At the beginning of our stay at a friend’s house in Oregon six weeks ago, my eight-year-old daughter Carys had biked a flat mile on a mountain biking trail; when we got to a very slight incline she made it 20 feet further and then it all fell apart. She whined; she cried; she refused to go on. Later in the day, after we had both calmed down, we discussed the idea of Doing Hard Things, and we ultimately both agreed that we wanted to improve our mountain biking skills this summer.   She has done both a beginner and an intermediate level bike camp since then and her skills have dramatically improved! We did the Trail of Refusal the weekend after the beginner camp and she made it all the way around the loop, and the only complaining was because our riding companions weren’t going fast enough! (I’ve also been riding a lot - selling my old bike for a good price enabled the purchase of a new, much lighter one and I’m now significantly faster than I was. I may need a skills camp myself next time we’re in town…)   Professor Angela Duckworth discusses Doing Hard Things in her work on grittiness. A few days ago Listener Jamie, who helped me to prepare to talk with Alfie Kohn several years ago and who co-interviewed Dr. Mona Delahooke with me, sent me an article from The Atlantic that had just popped up in her newsfeed called The Case Against Grit and said “You said the same thing ages ago!”.   I was pretty sure I did say that, but I decided to check it out. Looking back at something I wrote four years ago has the potential to be pretty scary - my ideas have evolved a lot since then. Does this episode still ring true? Did I miss major issues? I discuss these ideas in a preview to this re-released episode.  

Learning Membership

Do you want to turn your child’s interests into learning opportunities? The Learning Membership is here to help you. Make learning a fun adventure that not only strengthens your bond, but also nurtures your child’s intrinsic love of learning—an essential foundation for success in an AI-driven world.

Get tools and strategies to support your child’s love of learning and future-proof their success in navigating whatever comes their way. No special skills needed—just a willingness to explore alongside them.

All the usual stuff applies - sliding scale pricing, money back guarantee. Enrollment will open again soon. Click the banner to learn more!    

Jump to highlights

(03:29) How Grit is intimately connected to White supremacy (04:31) Characteristics of White supremacy in the concept of Grit (05:45) Teaching grittiness seems to be about passing along cultural ideas that we might not agree with (07:55) Raising children with a broad skill set and a self-identified passion are those who have encouraged rather than pushed their children in many interests rather than just one. (11:03) Invitation to join the Supporting Your Child’s Learning Membership and You Are Your Child’s Best Teacher workshop (12:20) Understanding what is Grit scale (15:30) Is grit about perseverance and passion (17:15) What it takes to be Grit (22:01) Using effort to overcome potential deficiencies in talent (25:27) Issues in measuring the Grit scale to students in schools (27:09) How could we give students from poor backgrounds a better advantage in school (28:24) Children experience at least two responses to stress (30:01) Understanding the issues of grit in famously successful people (32:21) The 7 virtues of grit (33:42) One of the major purposes of school is to pass on society’s culture and values to the next generation (35:09) The 4 key beliefs that cause a student to persevere more in the classroom (37:04) To whom exactly is grit for (40:15) Why grit might not actually be the secret to success (42:13) Is grit something we want to encourage in our child (43:51) Ways on how you can nurture your child with grit (46:26) What is The Hard Thing Rule   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so   Jenny  00:10 Do you get tired of hearing the same old interests two podcast episodes? I don't really But Jen thinks you might. I'm Jenny, a listener from Los Angeles, testing out a new way for listeners to record the introductions to podcast episodes. There's no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn't just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it in context for you as well, so you can decide whether and how to use this new information. I listen because parenting can be scary and it's reassuring to know what the experts think. If you'd like to get new episodes in your inbox along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn't listening to you and what to do about each one, sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/subscribe. You can also join the free Facebook group to continue the conversation. Over time you might get sick of hearing me read this intro so come and record one yourself. You can read from a script Jen's provided or have some real fun with it and write your own. Just go to YourParentingMojo.com/recordtheintro. I can't wait to hear yours.   Jen Lumanlan  01:33 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Do you ever wonder what the future holds for your child? Do you think about what career they might have and what they'll need to know to do that and whether they'll have the persistence and grit to be able to stick with it through all the challenges they'll face? If so then today's episode has ideas to help a few days ago listener Jaime who helped me prepare to talk with Alfie Kohn several years ago and who co-interviewed Dr. Mona Delahooke, with me more recently sent me an article that the Atlantic had originally published back in 2019, that it just popped up in her newsfeed it was called the case against grit. And she said to me, you said the same thing ages ago, I had to dig back into my archives to find the episode I'd published on grit way back in 2017, and I have to say I was a bit scared to see what I'd find. I've been writing and editing the book that I've been working on for about nine months now and each time I come back to it, I find some idea that I could have expressed better or that I've learned more about and now think differently about and I'm so glad it hasn't been published yet, although I do wish we didn't still have an entire year to wait for that. So I read the article in The Atlantic by Ashley Fetters, which is a piece discussing reporter David Epstein's book Range, and I'm sorry to say that I missed that book until now because it sounds really good. So I'll read it and if it is really good, then we'll get him on the show. And then I read the transcript of my episode because here's the secret, I never actually listened to my own episodes because I so rarely listen to podcasts because reading is so much faster, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised the transcript doesn't capitalize Black and White when referring to race, which is a policy we put into place last year so the transcript of the re-released episode will correct that, and I also often refer to nonspecific children using male or female pronouns and now I'll say “they,” but content wise, I was pretty pleased with what I saw. Before we get into that formal released episode, I wanted to put a bit of context around it so you can see where it fits with some of the ideas that we often talk about here on the show, it was actually kind of fun to look back to this episode from five years ago, and see some of my early thoughts that now form the core of my work. The thesis of the book that I'm writing is that on one hand, a lot of parents are really struggling with their child's behavior, the child is resisting and throwing tantrums and acting out and the parent needs to find a way to navigate that. On the other hand, we have some pretty big social problems out in the world, things like White supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, which I know not everyone thinks is a problem, but I'm pretty sure it is, and I should probably do an episode on that at some point to go through that, many parents see these challenges in their different hands and don't see a connection between them, and my thesis is that these ideas are intimately connected, and the way that we work with our children to solve the challenges we're having today will set the stage for how they will treat others out in the world. And the Grit episode was the start of my critical look at capitalism as I explored what are the characteristics of workers that most employers want? By and large, they want employees who do what they're told who don't ask questions and who stick with a task until it's done. From that perspective grit delivers, and almost two years before my first episode in the exploration of ideas at the intersection of race and parenting this episode looks at how embedded grittiness is in the Protestant work ethic. Now, I'm able to go beyond that and connect to the idea of grit to characteristics of WHITE supremacy, which include ideas like objectivity, the idea that there is such a thing as being objective or neutral, which is inherently superior to an emotional perspective, having one right way of doing things, perfectionism, paternalism the idea that those who hold power control decision making and define standards and perfection in the one right way, their progress always involved doing more and bigger things, the right to comfort of those in power, and either or thinking, seeing things in terms of good or bad, right or wrong. There are more of these tech characteristics but these are the ones most relevant to the concept of grit If we're aiming to teach that to somebody else. When we can see objectively there's one right way of doing things, one right way of being in the world, which happens to look a lot how middle class White folks are in the world, we can say that everybody else isn't doing it perfectly enough, when a perfect grade is the only thing that counts and our entire worth is evaluated based on it, we raise children who are afraid of making mistakes, when those in power get to define what that vision of perfection looks like and decide whether everybody else is being gritty enough to measure up and use that standard as a way of holding on to power because letting go of that power is too scary. We see how grittiness is linked with White supremacy, parents who want to raise gritty children often want their child to have an advantage in life, they want their child to be able to go to a good college, climb the corporate ladder, and make a good salary, and they see the opportunities to do these things are limited. It's not that they want other children to miss out, but if that happens to be a side effect of striving for the best then so be it, and pretty obviously in a good bad binary, being gritty is good. Not being gritty is bad. It's either or thinking at its finest because parenting is a major way that culture gets passed on, we need to think about what we're teaching our children, and we're trying to get them to be grittier. Teaching grittiness seems to be about passing along cultural ideas that we might not agree with, and might not end up helping our children much either. So, David Epstein, who wrote the book Range, that this newer Atlantic article was about actually do cite an older article in The Atlantic in the original episode, so David Epstein writes about how Roger Federer, is years spent dabbling in basketball, handball, skiing, wrestling swimming table tennis skateboarding helped him to define and develop his hand-eye coordination and his athleticism, Federer's parents encouraged him to sample all kinds of different activities, the opposite of not ever allowing them to quit. Amy Shah, who wrote the now infamous book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was intending to mold her daughter Lulu into a violin prodigy but, Lulu quit at age 13 because she didn't want to do it anymore. When our children are young, we can more or less force them to do things we want them to do because we think they'll benefit from it, but eventually they rebel, and at that point, they're likely to just give up since nothing they ever do is good enough, or maybe find their own thing they're interested in and follow their interests. Instead, I was actually curious to see what Lulu is up to now. And so I looked her up on Twitter, and so she graduated from Harvard Law School this year, and she tweeted a few months ago, “Just got to my parents’ house after graduating from law school, and I gotta say, there's truly No Place Like Home. Got yelled twice about my work ethic and had my whole personality picked apart in a matter of minutes.” Obviously, people exaggerate things they write on Twitter but I have to say, this doesn't sound like the kind of relationship I want to have with my daughter. I also want her to be able to know when to pursue a goal because she's so incredibly passionate about it and believes in it so much, and knowing when it really is better to quit, even if she's already invested a lot. So this newer article in The Atlantic includes, funnily enough with some thoughts on the parenting styles that David Epstein encountered in his research for the book, the one that stands out, as most conducive to raising children with a broad skill set and a self-identified passion are those who have encouraged rather than pushed their children in many interests rather than just one. Epstein, mentioned Jack Andraka, the teenage inventor who invented a new test for pancreatic cancer and said that, “Jack would get interested in something to experiment on and his parents would just facilitate that where they pressed a little was for him to be engaged with stuff, whatever it was. Epstein told me they were talking about science, they were talking about issues, but they would get materials for him and encourage him to experiment.” So, Jack's parents haven't decided he's going to be a scientist, he decided that for himself that he was interested in it, and they helped to connect him with people and equipment that could help him further that interest, It was his father who used carbon nanotubes for his work as a civil engineer and who got Jack thinking about other possibilities for their use, and how he devised the cancer test. After he got in touch with a professor at Johns Hopkins, his parents would drive him there to work on the idea and the research lab often dozing outside into the night while he worked. Jack, and his dad built the plexiglass apparatus used to hold the test strips. An article for the Smithsonian Magazine relates, “About 2:30am, one December Saturday, Jane Andraka, was jolted from her parking lot, stupor by an ecstatic Jack, he opens the door she remembers, and you know how your kid has this giant smile and that shine in their eye when something went right? The test had detected mesothelin in an artificial sample. A few weeks later, it pinpointed mesothelin in the blood of mice bearing human pancreatic tumors.” Now, I'm not saying that you need to have the resources that these parents clearly have to put much of their own lives on hold to drive Jack all over the place until all hours of the night. Nobody at his school that's an island when he declines to engage in a calculus lesson because it's so trivial, and instead sits down to read a book, you can bet that a Black child doing the same thing we get a different response. And apparently things didn't all work out Rosalie, several scientists say that his test doesn't actually detect anything useful including Dr. Ira Paston, who is a world authority on pancreatic cancer. Jack didn't publish his findings in a peer reviewed journal so others couldn't examine his data. In the US, we did get a bit caught up in the Boy Wonder narrative and didn't look closely enough at whether the hype was warranted. But aside from these issues people around Jack are doing some really interesting things, they're saying that he doesn't have to bother learning what everybody else is learning, and can learn what interests him. They aren't really even trying to teach him. They're letting him make connections between ideas and see where those lead and he's excited to learn, he's engaging in real world projects, and he's doing it because he wants to do it. He's gritty to the max. He worked in the Johns Hopkins lab at nights and weekends for months, apparently subsisting on hard boiled eggs and twix, but nobody had to teach him how to be gritty, he learned it himself, because this topic is so important to him. And I believe that everyone should be learning in this way and not just people who live in suburban Maryland, where 90% of the residents are White and household income is 1.5 times the national average. And that's actually exactly what I support parents in doing with their young children today, if you want your child to be gritty, but you don't know how to make it happen, if you want your child to grab on to something that they're excited to do, and run with it, and know how to be their guide on the side even if you don't know anything about the topic yourself, then the supporting your child's learning membership that opens for enrollment between September 12^th and 22^nd  will help you to do all of those things and more. And if you want a free preview of what it's like to be in the membership then I'd invite you to join the You Are Your Child's Best Teacher Workshop, that's getting underway right now at YourParentingMojo.com/BestTeacher. We've already sent out the pre work for it but you can catch up on it quickly. We're doing five days of content spread over two weeks this time around so our pace is much more relaxed than it was when we did this last year. We'll leave registration open for just a few more days until Wednesday, August 31^st, so you can come in and join us if you would like to, the group will be big enough that you'll get a real sense of being in community with others who are on this journey, but small enough that you'll likely hear from me directly if you answer questions, that's the thing with smaller groups, you get a much more personalized experience, just like your child gets a more personalized experience with you supporting them. I'd love to work with you so come on over and sign up at YourParentingMojo.com/BestTeacher. And now let's hear some more about the research on grit. In our rereleased episode.   Jen Lumanlan  12:14 We have a pretty interesting topic lined up for today, or at least I think so. We're going to talk about grit. If you've heard about grit over the last couple of years is probably because of one woman named Angela Duckworth, who is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and who invented what she calls the grit scale. She won a MacArthur Genius Award for her research on grit in 2013. She tells a story about how she developed this scale that goes like this: Several years ago, the US Army was having trouble figuring out which of their 1200 new cadets were going to...